Alternatives to structure and use javascript libraries without npm

Mendes 0
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We have been working on our projects all tied to a single lerna repository, as:

lerna
  |----- app1 - application 1
  |----- app2 - application 2
  |----- appN - application N
  |----- commondb (common database libraries for app1, app2 to appN)
  |----- commonux (common ux libraries for app1, app2 to appN)
  |----- commonauth (common authentication libraries for app1, app2 to appN)

As the code grew a lot, lerna is really full of packages (40+ packages) and too much code.

We're now trying to split lerna into smaller pieces and we're looking for alternatives. Doing that, applications would need a way to import common libraries as we do today.

Certainly NPM seens to be a solution (making each common package independent and publishing it on NPM), but we want to keep our code in our environment without third party services or clouds (we have our own git server instance).

What are the current options to manage javascript libraries that we can make use of? What would be the recommended one in such a scenario?

lerna npm javascript
2 Answers

Your decision can be greatly affected by answering the following - do you want your apps to be running the same version of the shared libraries? Or do want autonomy within the libraries, and to be able to publish and manage different versions of the libraries, where it is the responsibility on the consumer app to manage which version of the library it is using?

If it is the former, my suggestion would be to stick with a Mono-repo approach, maybe consider something like NX, where it has some nice tooling for only linting, testing, building and deploying only the affected modules, whilst sharing a common single package.json and therefore common libraries shared across multiple apps and libs

Otherwise you are looking at potentially managing multiple repos, multiple versions of each library, multiple pipelines, multiple workspace configs.

andy mccullough0

You could simply use pnpm workspaces: protocol which allows you to create a monorepo structure but without even requiring you to publish when used this way: "foo": "workspace:*". So if you wish to use this approach, then you could have a monorepo structure and just keep local packages, it will use the local code without downloading anything. I used this concept in a Vue pnpm Workspace demo. With this approach you could stay with local packages and/or go with Lerna to publish if you also want to (I prefer Lerna-Lite which is what I use) since they now both support pnpm/yarn workspace: protocol. This approach is flexible and allows you to switch to publishing (to npm or a private registry) at any point in the time in the future if you wish to, in other words there's no major code refactoring to add Lerna after the fact when using a pnpm workspace structure.

ghiscoding0
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